Diagnosis: you have been diagnosed with a viral respiratory infection that may be due to coronavirus (COVID-19). At this time your provider has determined that you do not required an emergency evaluation. If your symptoms progress or worsen, it may be necessary to seek additional care in person. Those are scary words but that’s what […]
Category: Updates
Updates to my life, where I currently am, what I’m currently doing, and what I’m currently thinking. Sometimes, the line between “essay” and “update” is a bit blurry.
Breaking Quarantine, Day 93
Aside from essential trips for groceries, an occasional waltz through a nearby cemetery, or some long drives here and there, my self-imposed quarantine has been spent mostly in the same two-bedroom apartment. Three months ago, today, I made the decision to stay-at-home as the world around me changed due to a pandemic. Today, for the […]
Quarantine, Day 79
I went for a walk–a real one, not a virtual one–with my friend Andrew, the two of us maintaining healthy social distancing and wearing our masks. Though I’ve gone on long drives, waltzes into the cemetery, and made runs to a grocery store packed with people, this marks the first time in over two months […]
Quarantine, Day 68
My sister this afternoon told me that her husband had been in contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19, and we agreed that she should cancel her plans to spend time today with our parents. Despite a significantly lower number of cases than where I live in Northern New Jersey, rural America–particularly the places […]
Quarantine, Day 58
The world outside my window just seems so surreal, the way it’s picked up and continued as though there is nothing deadly and invisible all around us. From my window, you would think nothing had changed. From my window, though, my worldview is so incredibly limited. It’s within the house that I’m painfully more aware […]
A Trip to Branchburg, from Quarantine to the Open Road
Down the road about an hour from where I live is a little town called Branchburg. I’ve never been to Branchburg. I don’t know why anybody living just outside of New York City would ever go to Branchburg. But now, I can say, I’ve been, and I think I’ll probably go back. That’s because after […]
Quarantine, Day 50
The longer this pandemic flows on, the more it seems the days grow somehow quieter, eerily quiet in fact. The bar beneath us hasn’t made a peep in well over a month. There are fewer cars on the street below, fewer voices on the corner with no one waiting for the bus. I know it’s […]
Quarantine, Day 46
Purchasing groceries under a quarantine is a huge stressor, at least in North Jersey. I’d taken to ordering the food via pick-up to try to avoid having to go into the store, but because so many of the online order apps are sold out, you have to get lucky to find anything available within one […]
Quarantine, Day 37
Coming out of the Great Depression, one of the Civil Works Administration projects of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal was the construction of a small stretch of road through Bergen County, New Jersey and into lower New York State. It’s maybe one of the most beautiful drives you can take in this part of the […]
One Month in Quarantine
A long while ago, in what now feels like another life, I was a painter–acrylics on canvas. I took it seriously enough that my portfolio at one point won me a $50,000 visual arts fellowship. I was, however, a terrible student of art. Something about being “assigned” an art project or having to work with […]
